Advances in communications technology often change how people communicate and share information. More recently, social networking sites are providing new ways for users to interact and keep others abreast of their personal and business dealings. The growth of social networking sites is staggering. New sites are emerging daily and new users are joining in droves. Today, social networking sites are being used regularly by millions of people around the globe, and it seems that social networking via websites will continue to be a part of everyday life at least in the United States.
Social networking services offered to users by social networking sites may provide various ways for users to interact and keep others abreast of their personal and business dealings. For example, these services may provide means to stay in touch with friends, communicate with other users, provide information about themselves or their businesses, identify common friends, recommend others' products or services, and so on. These services may be useful to individuals, personally, and to entrepreneurs and businesses that are trying to expand their customer bases.
For some users, there is a great deal of information available through social networking services that may be helpful on both a personal level and on a professional level. The vast amount of information, however, may be difficult to manage and may be as confusing as it is useful. Often, the different services may store duplicate, but possibly inconsistent information (e.g., the same contact may be stored on different services, but each service may have a different phone number stored for the contact). Further, while the different social networking sites may have provide similar services, such as the ability of users to identify friends and business contacts, they also have differences, such as the types or formats of information that may be retained for friends and contacts. These differences may make it difficult to consolidate information from the different services.
In addition to the potential difficulties in managing the information associated with the different social networking services, some businesses may have concerns about the exchange of information between employees, clients, vendors, etc. These concerns may relate to the nature of the activities in which users are engaged, the type of information that is being communicated, the specific information being disclosed, whether malicious or otherwise damaging material is being accessed or allowed onto the business's computers, and so on. Because the information that is the basis of these concerns is distributed across the different social networking sites and is stored in different ways, it may be difficult for a business to examine and audit the information for purposes of determining compliance with the policies of the business.
It would therefore be desirable to provide systems and methods for consolidating the information that is available to users through social networking services and providing means to efficiently store and access the consolidated information, thereby improving the ability of users to make use of the information and improving the ability of businesses to assess compliance with their policies.